Posted
by
timothyon Thursday September 11, 2008 @02:32PM
from the yeah-but-steve-roberts'-has-a-keyboard dept.

NtwoO writes "Tech junky Greg Kolodziejzyk broke the 24 hour world human powered boat record in his preparation to pedal across the Atlantic. Greg has a history of cool projects with impressive outcomes. His previous endeavor was a bicycle that was used to break the 24 hour cycling record for fully faired bicycles. Greg goes through a thorough design process when building his projects."

"World (Human Powered Boat) Record Broken", "Human Powered Boat World Record Broken" or the slightly longer "World Record Broken for Human Powered Boat".

AwkwardTitle would be a suitable tag - not strictly incorrect, just a bit much to get your head around.

On the content of the post: According to this site [mnsu.edu], the shortest distance across the Atlantic is between Senegal and Brazil at 2,575 km. If he could keep up his rate of 245.16 km / 24 hours, he'd get across that distance in around 250 hours, or around 10.5

Well, if you are going to go there, I suppose one might mention that "human-powered" should be hyphenated when used as an adjective. Without the hyphen, I'm afraid that it would be a powered boat that was also human. Shades of Asimov.:-)

How would that thing handle waves? It seems like it wouldn't last quite so long in waters that aren't as calm as they are in Catfish Lake Montana. But then again, he does use a mac, so maybe the power of Steve Jobs can sustain him on his epic quest. Steve should at least provide some iPods for entertainment....

Probably not far. The point of a hydrofoil is to lift the boat off the water, thus reducing drag. For a canoe (which is bacially the shape of this) drag is not nearly the same as a motor boat moving at high speeds. It would take more energy to support the boat in the air, then would be gained from the lesser friction.

That's assuming that he could even get the boat off the water, which whould likely be impossible with only one human power.